Strategy

These steps depend upon some pre-configuration, already done for you prior to the class.
Specifically we created a Virtual Private Cloud with a public subnet for this exercise.
We created an associated Internet Gateway and a Security Group. The latter permits ssh
in from any location on the internet, so in passing this is not best practice because
your work is visible from anywhere.

In what follows you will want to have a Project Identifer Tag or PIT handy. This is just
a short ID string that you will use to tag everything you create. Mine for example might
be ‘Basie’ because I like the music of Count Basie. In what follows when you see either
‘PIT’ or possibly ‘Basie’ you should substitute your own string. In this way everyone
can proceed on parallel tracks.

Our strategy is fairly simple here:

Start up a manager machine on AWS

Log in to this machine as ‘ec2-user’ using ssh

Update this machine, install cfncluster software and create a cluster called PIT0

Turn to the CloudFormation service on the AWS console to monitor your progress

Autoscale group

Cloud Formation service

Cloud Watch service

Simple Notification Service

EC2 instance: Launcher with cfncluster installed

cfncluster creates a cluster that includes…

An EC2 Master instance

Recognizes Worker EC2 instances as they are added to the resource pool

If you are Windows using PuTTY you will need to convert to a .ppk file format

This is done using the PuTTYGen application

Once it spins up (green dot, ip address present) ssh to this EC2 as ec2-user

Notice that the VPC and so on already exist: Preliminary spadework we are sparing you in this
course.

Log in and configure the Launcher

You should now be able to log in to your cfncluster Launcher using ssh (or PuTTY on Windows)
where your login name is ‘ec2-user’. You do not enter a password as you are using your .pem
(or .ppk) file to authenticate.

Once logged in you will update your machine, install the cfncluster tools, configure
cfncluster and create a new named cluster. This in turn will lead to the last steps to
run a large-scale compute task.

Running configure will produce a config file within the .cfncluster directory in your home
directory. (Use ‘ls -al’ to see that this exists.) A good way to get the configure steps
correct is to follow the details at
a web page like this one.

cfncluster create PIT0

The cluster you create includes a head node. By default this will be a small EC2 instance (T2).
On the AWS console in your browser you can monitor your progress

A Worker program

This C code performs part of a Fourier transform on a simple dataset. In ensemble